And So It Begins

It’s finally here- today is the day I leave for Peace Corps service as a high school science teacher in Mozambique for the next two years!  As I write this, it’s 4:30am, and I’m on a bus with my 54 fellow Moz education volunteers on the way to the New York JFK airport for our very loooooong flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, followed by a much shorter one-hour flight to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. 

Waiting in the hotel lobby at 2am for the bus to JFK airport

Once there, we’ll stay at a hotel in the city for two days of safety sessions, cultural info presentations, and medical debriefing before driving a couple hours west to the smaller town of Namaacha, where we will all stay for the next 10 weeks learning Portuguese, receiving some teacher training, and listening to safety presentations. After those 10 weeks, our volunteer group will split up and be placed at sites across the country to work and teach for the next two years. We won’t find out our site locations until the last few weeks of training though. Oh, the suspense…

Jumping back a bit, yesterday afternoon our volunteer group, called Moz 23 (since we’re the 23^rd Peace Corps volunteer group to serve in Mozambique), met for the first time in a hotel conference room in Philadelphia for what Peace Corps calls our “staging” event, aka our pre-departure orientation. It was an afternoon of signing forms (the point at which we all became official Peace Corps Trainees!), and reviewing the Peace Corps mission, goals, and policies, as well as an introduction to safety and security. I already got to meet a couple group mates who were flying out on the same flight from Minneapolis in the morning. Actually, it turns out there’s quite the handful of Minnesotans in our group- at least four of us! OH YAH.

Outside the staging conference room

Post-staging, a group of Moz 23 having our last "American" meal

It’s been such a bizarre experience to finally be here, meeting my group, and facing the fact that I really am leaving the U.S. for two years, and that I really am going to Moz and that I really am going to experience all the things I’ve been imagining and reading about (thank the lord for reddit, facebook, and volunteer blogs!) for years. It’s both insanely exciting and nerve-wracking. I have to admit I’m also excited for the possibility of meeting current volunteers whose blogs I’ve been following, since they’re kind of like celebrities in my mind now, haha. I’ll do my best not to be star struck ;)

For friends and family who were wondering about my mailing address, here it is below:

Corpo da Paz/U.S. Peace Corps

Avenida Zimbabwe 345, C.P. 4398

Maputo, MOZAMBIQUE

HOWEVER, mail often takes several weeks to arrive, and it’s possible that after training I will be in a different part of the country. So personally I would recommend waiting at least until December to send mail, after I know my permanent location. Either way, whenever sending mail to Mozambique, there are several tips for ensuring that it arrives, since corruption in the post offices often leads to theft and delays:

·      Write the address in red ink, it looks more official.

·      Don’t value a package at more than $10 if possible, since it’s risky to send valuables, but also because in order to receive the package I will have to pay a significant percentage of the value as customs tax.

There we go! It’s really happening :D Thanks all, hopefully the next post will be from Africa!